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Motorola’s 360 was the first beautiful round Android Wear, but it’s certainly not the last. LG is bringing one to the table as well, the LG G Watch R. Not to be outdone, LG’s second Android Wear outing has a few fancy special features of its own: No “flat tire” on its screen and a…
Apparently there’s a crazy dude going around in Japan in full Batman uniform driving a batcycle. And that’s perfectly fine by me, quite honestly. Go Batman go! SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
In the relatively brief but inexplicably deep-pocketed history of internet-enabled crowdfunding, people have proven their insatiable thirst for investing in stuff that may—or may not—ever make it to reality. Some of these proposals are very cool; some are very stupid. And some get a whole hell of a lot of money. “The Coolest” belongs to…
One factor limiting the integration of your home’s appliances into the so-called Internet of Things is the size and ruggedness of the device’s modem. But with this miniscule new modem from Intel, anything bigger than a penny will be granted cellular connectivity. The XMM 6255 has just a 300 sq mm footprint, making it ideal…
Television documentaries have become overproduced messes that focus too much on glitz and personality, and not enough on facts. Send me back to the time when series like BBC’s Civilization graced the TV screen. It’s all about the history, and its minimal style is utterly captivating. Civilization is a 13-part series that aired in 1969…
Today, NASA has officially committed to build the new Space Launch System, the world’s most powerful rocket ever, which hopefully will take us to Mars by 2030. The program is now set for development—the ‘first time that an exploration class vehicle has gotten this status since the space shuttle.’ According to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden:…
Here’s kind of a dirty secret about bike share: Bikes don’t end up distributed evenly across the system, so most cities use trucks and trailers to shuffle the bikes around to the kiosks where they’re needed most at different times of day. Turns out it requires a complicated algorithm to determine exactly when and where…
Vacations are funny things: You pour so much time, energy, and daydreaming into them that, in the end, the reality rarely lives up to what you imagined as you refreshed Travelocity all those months. But if that imaginary perfect trip had a perfect sound, it would be the Portland-and NYC-based Akron/Family’s Island. I first discovered…
Check out famous race and aerobatic pilot Bruce Bohannon taking the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge inside his plane. He placed the ice water in a little bucket between his seat harness and his shirt, took off, and then did a loop. The only thing cooler than this would be if an astronaut did it in…
At one time duct tape only came in a single color: silver. It made the material seem like some kind of NASA-engineered, space-age, super tool, but eventually mankind demanded more. Colors and patterns were introduced, but that still wasn’t enough to satiate humanity’s desire for choice. So Duck Brand is now introducing scented duct tape…
On a dried-up lake bed in Death Valley are dozens of rocks that have puzzled us for decades. The rocks have each left a dusty trail, evidence of some unknown force propelling them forward. Scientists have now finally observed the rocks moving and settled on an explanation: Thin ice and a gentle breeze. Speculation about…
Have you ever been in the woods and wondered, “Why isn’t this place more like a spa?” Well, wonder no more, my adventurous friend. The Nomad Collapsible Hot Tub is here to save the day. As the name implies, the Nomad is a portable hot tub. The heavy vinyl shell fits onto a sturdy frame…
This beautiful purple jewel is an artist rendition of W0855—a Jupiter-sized brown dwarf 7.3 light years from Earth. If the scientists who just published a new paper on its composition are right, it’s the first object outside the solar system in which we have observed water clouds—an amazing discovery. Keep in mind that we have…
After quietly testing out its handy new analytics dashboard just over a month ago, Twitter is officially opening the service up to the rest of the world. And the results can be—er, kinda depressing. The widespread release was confirmed earlier today by Ian Chan, a front-end engineer at Twitter: Now, any tweeter with an account…
Filling a venue with temporary seating is a time-consuming process—both during setup and take down—since it requires heavy chairs to be unstacked and then stacked again. But the designers at Seoul-based Centimeter Studio realized there was a better way. Their Sleeed chairs slide together and stack horizontally, so a whole row of them can be…
Exploring the lunar surface is now a quick click away for desk-bound normals, but there are still some moon mysteries that only those special folks from Apollo missions will ever really experience. Like how it smells. The consensus: Spent gunpowder. In his book Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, Buzz Aldrin described…
Thousands of years ago, a minority of ancient Egyptians set a majority to work building some of the oldest human-made structures in the world. It seems like we’ve been debating about how they did it ever since: Water? Animal labor? Magic? A team of researchers thinks they’ve found the best explanation yet. In a paper…
Facebook wants you to know Messenger isn’t spying on you. After people got mad about the company’s decision to make downloading Facebook Messenger necessary to use Facebook Chat on mobile, the backlash got so bad Facebook’s Peter Martinazzi issued an official “calm the eff down” announcement. You might have heard the rumors going around about…
When it rains, it pours. It pours down streets, into sewers, and often right into people’s basements. What if we could flood the abandoned basements and spare the occupied ones? Milwaukee has a novel sewer solution that just might be a silver lining in the foreclosure crisis. In Milwaukee, reports Jenny Jones for Civil Engineering,…
Do you think science is really, really cool? Do you want to just play with it, making awesome things for no other reason than because you can? You want to find a Science Hack Day, and go to it. Tracking the real-time position of the International Space Station on a modified globe. Image credit: Matt…
